#How many chapters in the silent patient full#
The narrative unfolds from Nathan’s point of view, and his preoccupations – his acrimonious divorce and uneasy relationship with his teenage son the harsh psychological legacy bequeathed by his brutish father and its malign consequences for his family, but especially for his ill-favoured younger brother, Bub years of banishment by the local community following a reckless choice he made in anger – drive the story from the nervy, austere opening chapters to the turbulent, passionate, surprisingly romantic climax, when the Bright women – their mother, Liz, and Cameron’s widow (and, it turns out, briefly, Nathan’s ex) – come into full focus.
Harper writes carefully and acutely about terse, undemonstrative men at the moment when they find the capacity to restore themselves to some more vivid kind of life. The authorities are reluctant to devote resources to a case that, although strange, does not cry out for justice, so Cameron’s brother Nathan takes it on himself to dig deeper into events leading up to the death, and thereby inevitably into the tangled family history he has been determinedly keeping at bay. There is no apparent foul play, and his abandoned vehicle was in perfect working order. In the relentless sun of Outback Queensland at the Stockman’s Grave, a landmark whose meaning and significance is much discussed and disputed, the body of Cameron Bright is found. Setting is not a birthright but the measure of a particular author’s sensitivity and responsiveness crime fiction is not travel writing, but a sense of place looms large in the genre, and certain writers stake their claim: The Lost Man (Little, Brown £12.99) constitutes incontrovertible evidence that from now on, we will refer to Harper’s Australia as confidently and as casually as we talk of Chandler’s Los Angeles. After all, the great laureates of classic Californian detective fiction were all outsiders: Raymond Chandler, Chicago-born but raised in England and Co Waterford Dashiell Hammett of St Mary’s County, Maryland and Ross Macdonald, born in Los Gatos but raised Canadian in Kitchener, Ontario. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the unforgiving Australian landscape is evoked so authoritatively by Jane Harper, who is English by birth and spent a mere six of her first 28 years in that vast country.
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